Stories

Boosting the convenience factor through scanning and digitising of court documents

THE CLIENT

The client is the High Court, handling legal matters pertaining to two of the northern states and one Union Territory of India.

THE TASK AT HAND

The task involved scanning & digitization of records, with the latest innovative tech processes, in the subordinate courts of the two states and their adjoining Union Territory.

OUR SOLUTION

With a high network of branches across the country, the process hadn’t been centralised and therefore the loopholes came up. With our pan India presence, we offered a technology based solution that not only ensured end-to-end process management but helped to centralise it too.

Capturing documents and converting them into digital actionable data is becoming increasingly relevant today. Critical information related to the business and other organisations exists in different forms of office documents across multiple locations. It is essential to scan and capture the enterprise content, convert it to digital information to ensure the content is preserved safely. Be it the need to optimise an already existing IT infrastructure, or steer the intricacies of a digital world, it helps to have a scalable, agile, and more efficient way to address changing business demands.

Challenges

How technology plays a pivotal role to preserve documents for eternity

Much before winning the contract, the Honourable High Court invited us for the bids. The job demanded scanning & digitisation of records that might go back as far as 1865.

When we bagged this tender, amongst the major IT players in the market, we knew the road ahead was going to be challenging as well as interesting.

We were given the task to scan approximately 100 crore pages of various sizes for about 119 sites, including 76 subdivisions and 43 district headquarters.

We overcame a lot of challenges faced during this project including:

Till date, the records had all been managed physically. This manual handling of records led to damages of the important documents and posed a risk of misplacement and even misuse.

There were too many records pertaining to ‘Decided Cases’, which were lying in the premises. They had to be identified and weeded out as well. These records utilised too much of space in the court premises.

The retrieval process of the documents which got misplaced was a major challenge because no proper inventory had been maintained.

The memos and catalogs used to be sent manually, which had created enough problems already.

The lack of DMS made the court activities very difficult and the available data had to be handled manually.

The entire process was so cumbersome, that it led to a delay in court proceeding and hearings.

CLIENT EXPECTATIONS

The client had a few goals in mind while outsourcing their services. A digital transformation brings in certain benefits across the entire value chain. The goals the client specifically stated while outsourcing this activity

Centralised as well as automated approach

Quality of manpower

Overnight processing for a better TAT

SLA management

Better spike management

PROCESS AND PLANNING

The client had floated an Request for Proposal (RFP), wherein they sought permission to bring onboard service providers for scanning & digitisation of confidential court records.

The scope of the work included the scanning of records along with the deployment of D-Space, more popularly known as the DMS.

With a digital transformation, the client sought to:

Improve business agility with better access and use of information

Increase operational effectiveness with reorganised processes and best practice workflows

Manage the information growth effectively

Focus on core strategy and optimise the business performance

Solution

The work at hand was not only exciting but involved immense responsibility from our end as well.

To begin with, we started off with a complete project plan and shared it with the client, to showcase our approach and the rollout.

In the first phase of the operations, we covered 10 locations, where 20 scanners, 40 desktops and 100 trained and highly skilled forces were deployed to execute the project.

The scope of our work could be showcased as follows:

Our scanning services ensured that court records were digitised as per the specifications provided in the RFP

Metadata entry was carried out to capture critical and important information from the records

This created record images and enabled the storage of data in electronic formats

The D-Space was deployed for easy access of images and information to the end users with the help of secured logins

When it comes to a repository of images and information, this space was best made use of

The D-Space was also used as a platform to carry out activities like searches, retrievals, e-mail, printing, the addition of annotations, sending of memos, making catalogs, etc.

Impact

Writer Information, through its first D-Space Implementation, introduced a significant impact to the task at hand as designated by the client.

Through weeding out the records, we ensured that we could free up the required space, which was utilised by old records of ‘Decided Cases’

Our scanning of records helped in creating soft copies of the court records, which was kept aside for easy reference

Our scanning augmented the longevity of the records, which could now be archived for a much longer span, thereby eliminating the process of physical handling of records completely

The metadata boosted the speed, which added on to the convenience factor when it came to accessing important documents and other papers with valid information

Digital images were made available through the D-Space, which was again provided by Writer Information

D-Space (DMS) provided a secure platform to the users both within the court and outside the court premises when it came to accessing important data

With our services, we ensured that from now onwards, those who cannot personally visit the court can now access the data and information using DMS

Case records are now linked based on subjects, keywords, notes, appeal dates, etc. making it easy to search the required information on DMS.